Fig 1: Line application (Brightverge, 2014)
In the globalization era, instant messaging applications are becoming more common than SMS and even voice mail. Many people who are used to using smart phones (I believe more than half of the population of my home country of Thailand) use instant messaging apps for talking to co-workers, family and also keeping in touch with long-lost friends.
For people who are not familiar with Line, I’ll briefly introduce it. Line is an Instant messaging application which originated in Japan. It allows a user to contact other users via messages and free calls both nationally and internationally. Line has many features such as text/voice chat, photo/video and location sharing and voice/video call. The most popular feature, and one that attracts users is “Stickers” which is different from other chat applications. Moreover, Line has another feature called Line Official Account which provides marketing opportunities for brands because it can be a communication channel between brand and consumers. Additionally, Line Official Account is used for promoting products, special events and even public relations. Customers who are subscribers will get daily messaged via Line Official Account similar to friends’ messages. You may wonder how customers can be invited or added to Official Account. As I’ve told you, Line has stickers which uses this point to attract users. If Line users would like to download brand stickers, they have to add Official Account first.
Fig 2: Line Sticker (Thumbsup, 2013)
In Thailand, Line was launched in 2011. In only four years, Line has gained nearly 33 million users in Thailand. This number of users is ranked second in the world. Chaiwong (2014) published a study showing that Thai people engaged with Line 81.7 minutes per day, which lagged behind only to Facebook Messenger (although, by a large margin). Line is now available in 193 countries and has 300 million users around the world.
With this Line’s feature, many Thai brands have created their own Official Account in order to directly contact their subscribers. These brands are in different categories that can be divided in a pie chart, below.
Fig 3: A portion of Line official account which is compiled from Veedvil (2015)
It can clearly be seen that Line Official Account is used as a communication channel by many brands; especially the food and beverage industry. The reason why these brands use this application is that they can get more than one million subscribers in one week. However, the amount of subscribers is not necessarily a successful indicator because customers can block Official Account after they download stickers. Two reasons why people may block OA is they aren’t authentic customers or information from that brand isn’t useful for them. Therefore, the important factor which can build customer engagement is content. Some brand broadcast messages which emphasize only their products, but nothing special, can annoy customers with frequent spam, eventually causing customers to block that account.
One Line Official Account which has a good marketing strategy is Barbecue Plaza, a Thai restaurant. This brand uses Line as a channel for offering monthly special promotions such as 50% discount for a set menu and a set menu for only 1 baht. These special deals are only available for Official Account subscribers, thus, Barbeque Plaza has more than five million subscriber accounts.
Fig 4: Barbecue Plaza Line official (Marketingoops, 2015)
Therefore, if a brand would like to have Line Official Account, it should have a creative marketing communication plan in order to build new customer experiences and prevent getting blocked from subscribers. Moreover, Line Official Accounts are like one-way communication, so the brand should attach links for connecting to other social media in order to build better customer experiences and keep a database of customer information.
Do you agree with me? Do you have any sample of Line marketing?
Reference List:
Brightverge (2014) Messaging App Line Takes Its Mobile Payments Service Global. Available from: http://www.brightverge.com/messaging-app-line-takes-its-mobile-payments-service-global/ [Accessed 29 October 2015].
Chaiwong, N. (2014) LINE Marketing in Thailand. Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/norasathc/line-marketing-in-thailand [Accessed 27 October 2015].
Clifford, C. (2013) Top 10 Apps for Instant Messaging (Infographic). Available from: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230335 [Accessed 27 October 2015].
Marketingoops (2015) บาร์บีคิวพลาซ่าทุ่มเงิน 30 ล้าน ต่อยอดคาแรกเตอร์ มาร์เก็ตติ้ง ปลุกบาร์บีกอนมีชีวิตผ่าน LINE OA. Available from: https://www.marketingoops.com/news/brand-marketing/brand-move/bar-b-q-plaza-line-barbgon/ [Accessed 29 October 2015].
Thumbsup (2013) Mobile Operator ในอินโดนีเซียเปิดให้ส่งสติ๊กเกอร์ Line ผ่าน MMS. Available from: http://thumbsup.in.th/2013/11/indonesia-feature-phones-line-stickers-sms/ [Accessed 29 October 2015].
Veedvil (2015) LINE Stickers ของแบรนด์ต่างๆในประเทศไทยตลอด 3 ปี (2012-2015). Available from: http://www.veedvil.com/news/thailand-line-stickers/ [Accessed 28 October 2015].
Veedvil (2015) LINE Stickers ของแบรนด์ต่างๆในประเทศไทย 2012-2015 (ตอนที่ 2). Available from: http://www.veedvil.com/news/thailand-line-stickers-ep2/ [Accessed 28 October 2015].
KANOKNUP 
Hi, Kanok. I agree with you. Although, Line app can be used as an official account for any brands to reach many consumers, not all consumers will adopt brand accounts because they sometimes look intrusive and annoy Line users’ feeling, so they or even me often block their accounts to not receive any conversation with them anymore after they first get free item from adding these brands to their friends.
Apart from discount promotions they offered, do you have any suggestions for any brands who use Line to be a channel to connect with their customers?
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Hi Som! interesting topic!
Line is one of the best platforms to reach target due to heavy consumption in many countries especially South-East Asia. However, I think Line is not always appropriate with all brands.
Before brands are going to have official accounts or other services from Line, they should answer these questions. What is the objective? (awareness, engagement, sales), Is it worth enough to invest huge budget?. How can you measure the return on investment? The last question, Are you ready for other expenses such as creative contents that your brands have to feed, designs, On-air campaign, attractive rewards. etc? Base on my experience, brands have to hire agencies to run all processes. I think it would work when your brand already has strong brand identity and reputation and know how to apply this private communication platform to a marketing channel.
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I really agree with you that brands should have a strong strategy before they would like to create their own OA. Although, they can hire agencies to create their concepts, it’s not guarantee the effectiveness. According to your experience, you may know that each campaign launched via Line OA is quite hard to achieve target because most of customers block OA, they don’t get message that was sent. Therefore, I think using Line OA as communication channel waste both money and time.
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I have subscribe to many Line official accounts; I blocked some and I still have some left. The reason that I blocked comes back to the reason that I subscribed, I just wanted the stickers so after I got what I wanted, I block and deleted them. I only keep the news and my favourite restaurants accounts. However, do I really read what they sent to me? No. I found it annoying that I needed to clicked on them every morning just to get rid of ‘notification’. So why do I bother having them, right? I just feel like having information on my hand. I can look them up anytime because it’s there.
For promotions offered on OA eg. Sushi Hiro, I found it attractive at first. I feel like I need to go and get that offer today! However, after they promote 20% discount for almost like every other day, I just ignore it.
Therefore, OA doesn’t really work on me.
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I behave similar to you, get stickers and block them. However, when I worked at mobile operator in Thailand, I’ve to subscribe competitors’ OA because it’s a good channel for observing their movements. Actually, if it’s not associate with my job, I also keep only OA which give me useful information such as promotion and special deal.
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Do you really get attracted to the advertising on the Line though? I mean I usually got attracted from Instagram but not Line, so I just want to know from others as well. ;p
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Actually, I don’t get attracted from OA as much but Barbecue Plaza that I’ve mentioned in my blog is an exceptional. However, I wonder, ads. on Instagram that you refer is ads. posted by brands or general users and why it can attract you?
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For me, I am really addicted to LINE to keep in touch with my friends ffrom all around the world. I love this application as I have found many useful functions,for example, I am very far from my mother but I can use it to contact with her at all time. In contrast, in term of LINE marketing, what I found is it does not work on me as I rarely download stickers from company to receive their official account and get huge advertisement. It is annoying and I don’t interact with that much. I don’t think the advertisement in LINE will be effective for every customers as some people find it is just chatting application only. Anyway, in company’s point of view, they tried to get closer to every single customer by investing a big amount of marketing budget in here.
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Line OA is a communication channel which many brands may think that they can reach their customers. However, I agree with you that it can annoy customers, if messages from brands aren’t useful for them. Therefore, brands should create contents that can attract their customers, not only use OA for selling product.
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I alway buy sticker in LINE shop and also add many official account. Foe me, some advertising are effective and some may not. I love Thai Airways ads as I can received promotion and campaign from them. The positive point of ads on LINE is company can assure that their ads can reach to all of their audience.
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I’ve opposite your point of view because of the fact that I’ve told you many customers block Line official. Thus, I think this channel cannot approach to their customers. Why do you think Line can reach to all of audience?
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I totally agree with you that most of people who use line will blog the official accounts. But for me, i didn’t do that because i don’t like the character of these stickers lol. As i’ve read the news in last year, there are many companies fail about this strategy, waste time and budget. My teacher even recommended that don’t do this strategy. But what BBQ plaza did, is awesome in the term of reduce blogging the official accounts. If you noticed that in the past BBQ plaza was nearly to close down, After they change the marketing strategy, they’ve became flourished again.
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You are different from many Thai people, haha. A lot of customers have subscribe brand official account in order to get their stickers and block them. Therefore, I agree with your teacher that don’t use this tool, if you don’t have proper content for providing.
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Tell you the truth, some of cartoon is not my style, so i didn’t download. But if i were downloaded, i would block them right away too.
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